Julius Ashkin was an American physicist.
Ashkin was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 23, 1920. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1943. At Columbia, Ashkin developed model with Edward Teller on the interaction of spins (a form of angular momentum carried by elementary particles) on a crystalline lattice.
In late 1942 Ashkin began working at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago in conjunction with his Ph.D. work. In 1943 Ashkin moved to Los Alamos to work in Hans Bethe’s Theoretical Division.
Ashkin joined the faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1950. In 1953 Ashkin co-authored a paper with Bethe analyzing the energy loss of particles and radiation after passage through matter.
Later, he conducted experiments on unstable subatomic particles called pions using Carnegie Mellon’s synchrocyclotron. While on a sabbatical in 1958, he did experiments on the decay pions using European Organization for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) synchrocyclotron.
Ashkin served as the chairman of the physics department at Carnegie Mellon from 1961 to 1972.
Ashkin died on June 4, 1982 in Pittsburgh, PA.